Last Tuesday Shohei Imamura (今村 昌平) died at the age of 79. I’ve seen only two of his films, The Eel (うなぎ) and Dr. Akagi (カンゾー先生), but I found both of them to be profoundly affecting. They are very different, but what impressed me about both films was how they celebrated humantity without any effort to disguise its faults, egregious or otherwise. Imamura was truly one of the great cinematic talents. Go rent one of his films this summer.
This week the 49th annual San Francisco International Film Festival starts, and I’m happy to report that the team of media hackers I work with at Yahoo! Research Berkeley was able to contribute to part of it. That contribution is International Remix, a web-based tool for re-editing selections from this year’s festival. 19 directors from Brazil, Canada, England, Macedonia, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States agreed to allow their films to be sliced and diced by the world’s remixers. From Indio Nacional to The Pretty Boy Project, these films are yours for the cutting. Read on for details, or go play with it now. If you have any problems or suggestions, shoot an email to remixer-feedback@yahoo-inc.com.
After logging in to the tool (a simple matter of choosing a username and password under which your work will be saved), you’ll see a selection of “Director’s Clips” in a list on the left side of the screen. These are the original selections from which you can choose. Click on clips to load them into the preview window for viewing and editing. You’ll see some details about the clip’s origins displayed below the clip list.
In the preview window you can watch clips, and then adjust the “Clip Begin” and “Clip End” points to select a segment you want to use in your remix. The buttons to either side of the central play/pause button allow you to move foward or backward 1/10 of a second. You can use the right and left arrows on your keyboard to do the same thing. This is especially handy for fine adjustments to the clip begin and end points: just select one of the yellow triangles by clicking on it, then use the frame advance buttons or arrow keys to move it. Once you’ve clipped the segment to your liking, press the “Add to My Clips” button to add it to your clip bin. Or you can drag it into your clip bin by clicking and dragging anywhere on the preview screen. Or just drag directly to the remix timeline.
On the right side of the screen is “My Clips,” a list of all the segments you’ve clipped. These clips are persistent across logins, so you can start working on a remix, log out, and come back later to pick up where you left off. You can rename your a clip by clicking on its title. You can also add special black and title clips for your transitions. To add a clip from your bin to your remix, just press the “Add to My Remix” button, or drag a clip to the timeline.
The timeline at the bottom of the screen is where you sequence the clips you’ve trimmed into your final production. Just click and drag clips around to re-order them. If you click on a clip in the timeline, it will load into the preview window, so you can tweak the endpoints until they are just right. You can add a soundtrack to your remix using the drop-down select list on the right side of the timeline–hover over the selections to hear a preview. You can also turn on and off the audio for individual clips by clicking the “Audio On/Off” buttons at the bottom of each clip in the timeline. When you’re ready to view your work, press the “Play My Remix” button.
After you’ve had a chance to see what you’ve wrought, you can go back and work on it some more, or declare it finished and submit it to the Remix Gallery. You’ll have the chance to give your remix a title and a description, and to select up to five “poster frames” or keyframes to represent your remix in the gallery. Drag the slider back and forth to get the frame you want. Press the orange button with a plus to add another frame. To get rid of a frame, slide it as far as you can to the right or left, and it will disappear. Once you’re happy with the presentation, press “Submit” and your remix will show up in the gallery, looking something like this.
That’s it! So go check it out. Submit your remixes. And definitely show up for the party we’re throwing at Edinburgh Castle on the 24th. Finally, if you have any ideas, complaints, or just want to chat about International Remix, you can email remixer-feedback@yahoo-inc.com, or join our Yahoo! Group. Or just leave your comments below.
The 24th annual Asian American Film Festival (directed by my college friend Chi-Hui Yang) is going on right now. Friday night Yuki and I checked out Linda Linda Linda at the PFA, and I loved it. Four girls, three Japanese and one Korean, have three days to learn three songs by The Blue Hearts so they can play at their school festival. I’m a sucker for movies with plots that revolve around music (I cried at the end of School of Rock), and Linda Linda Linda is one of the best I’ve seen. Du-na Bae is especially good as the hilariously blunt Song. Definitely see it in SF on the 22nd if you have a chance.
Next week we’re checking out the festival’s showing of Cafe Lumiere.
Kent Bye says, “Playlists are to Music as Edit Decision Lists are to Film.” Yep, exactly.
Fascinating article at the NYT today about how film schools are seeing more and more students who are studying film not because they want a future in Hollywood, but because they see media literacy and the ability to communicate through audio and video as critical skills in our media-saturated world:
At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of “snitches” and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future.
I finally saw Uzumaki last night. Really great, better than I had expected. The plot concerns a small town where the idea of the spiral has infected the minds of its inhabitants. I love plots that involve mind viruses. Christopher Cherniak’s “The Riddle of the Universe and Its Solution” has a particularly good one: students and researchers studying the brain and consciousness begin falling into comas when they encounter the equivalent of Godel’s incompleteness theorem for the human mind.
Closely related are plots involving ideas so sublime they destroy their receivers, or videos so pleasurable/horrible to watch they destroy their viewers. Both Infinite Jest and Ringu made use of the latter.
As a plot device, a thing which will spread inexorably by virtue of its intrinsic structural properties makes for a compelling story. I was always fascinated by the idea of ice-nine for that reason. Prions, too.
Looking forward to seeing Peep “TV” Show when it comes to the PFA this weekend:
Peep “TV” Show finds room for re-organizing reality in the new media of on-line broadcasts, cell phones and ever-smaller cameras. Through the coming-of-age story of Hasegawa and Moé, it asks why people only seem to be alive if they are preserved in exchangeable, exhibitionist digital form - like cell phones, cameras, puri-kura, and surveillance cameras.
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